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izzy's playlists!
cherry valley forever
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hello vonnie
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Today's Document
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JVL
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@introvertadventures
you cant fucking hurt me bitch im protected by the migratory bird act
Please, I just want to know what your migratory flight path is, I promise I’ll release you after I give you this bracelet that will insanely up your game with the ladies
bitches love me for my bright and colourful leg band
theres something about being disabled and needing to sit down constantly in public spaces that makes you notice how often benches are put up as tributes and memorials. and before i hit an age where i really started to need them as frequently i think i never fully understood the sentiment but now its become very endearing to me. a bit of relief and care for you in the name of someone who offered us the same… i dont think i had a point with this post but i hope everyone thats been memorialized as such knows how loved they were to become synonymous with respite even to total strangers
Come On Feel The "Illinoise" Musical is now open on Broadway for a limited 16-week run at the St. James Theatre. Tickets for all dates can be found here.
I'm gearing up for a third show! 😍
moving and overwhelming in the best way
An attempt at summarizing the controversies that embroil mycorrhizal network research:
a bunch of scientists are miffed at how the media has taken "plants communicate and distribute nutrients through the mycorrhizal network" and run with it, finding the "mother tree" thing too anthropomorphizing and too presumptive about something very poorly understood
unfortunately all of the major models for understanding the mycorrhizal network are anthropomorphizing, even the more competition-centered ones...to the point that papers discuss whether the network is a "capitalist" or a "socialist" system
other researchers, screaming STOP USING LOADED TERMS THAT PROMOTE AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC INTERPRETATION
But, setting aside the question of whether trees can "intentionally" do something or be altruistic...how do we know the plant is the one in control? Are the trees "sending" nutrients or is the fungus taking the nutrients and sending them to other trees? Wait, how do we assign agency in a system like this at all? Isn't it unscientific to assume that any part of the system, fungus or plant, is consciously acting? Wait...are they actually separate organisms with their own interests, or is it more accurate to view all the members of a mycorrhizal network as one big super-organism? (Wait, is it anthropomorphizing to consider organisms as having interests? If yes, how do we describe what's happening using language?)
Basically, yes we have demonstrated and established that nutrients move from one plant to another plant in the mycorrhizal network, including from fully grown trees to saplings, plants in sunlight to shaded plants, and other things that are definitely fun to interpret as one plant "helping" the weaker plant. However, we don't actually know the intentions of plants, so for all we know, the fungus could be doing everything. Or it could be completely stupid to describe any of it as "one individual organism in the network Intentionally Does A Thing."
Big Problem: Although a shit ton of research is being done, most research in the mycorrhizal network is done on very simple networks of 1 or 2 plant species with a handful of selected fungal inoculants in otherwise sterile laboratory settings. These conditions do not reflect the natural world at all.
in fact, experimental conditions used to study mycorrhizal networks are mostly completely unlike anything that would ever exist...you know, Outside,
most of the research pertains to agriculture and there are many demonstrated benefits, and many farmers are ALREADY using methods to promote mycorrhizal networks, but my guess is that it's not as simple as matching crops up to fungal inoculants that help them for instant 20% yield increase, at least in Real Outdoor Soil with an existing microbiome and seed bank.
Roughly speaking, 50% of mycorrhizal associations benefit seedling establishment, and the remaining 50% are themselves split halfway between "no effect" and "negative effect." Doesn't this mean that the mycorrhizal network is not always chill and altruistic?
Well, those findings might mean absolutely nothing either way, since in a field-setting plant community, there are dozens if not hundreds of fungi species (the diversity and number of specialists increases in later-successional communities) that are part of the mycorrhizal network, and through them any given seedling might be linked to a thousand different plants.
Some researchers find it puzzling how so many mycorrhizal partnerships seem to have no effect. Maybe the effect only comes online in certain conditions?
Parasitism, mutualism and commensalism aren't fixed types of relationship, and two partners in the mycorrhizal network can and do switch between the three constantly. This is another problem: the experiments don't usually follow both partners in a plant-fungal pairing to the end of their natural lives, and it's been shown that a fungus can be mutualistic early in a plant's life and later on become more parasitic (for example). Or that a fungus can be beneficial in poor soil conditions and become parasitic in rich soil conditions.
But...is this really best understood as a situational switch between types of symbiosis, or can we judge it by the net effect on both partners throughout their life spans, or...my brain is breaking
Like, a fungus that mostly decreases the fitness of the host plant, BUT becomes very helpful in the presence of extreme drought...is it a parasite or mutualistic partner?
Some researchers lean toward a source-sink model where nutrients tend to flow toward plants that are most lacking and away from plants with most abundance. This is a rough approximation of something ridiculously complicated
Plants can and do select fungal partners to pair with and reject fungi that contribute fewer benefits.
Fungi also appear capable of selectively distributing resources based on the fitness of the host, or at least they did this one experiment where the fungus was connected to two different trees and researchers ripped all the leaves off one of the trees. This caused the fungus to divert its nutrient flow to the undamaged tree (throwing in its lot with the tree most likely to survive). However, we're not sure if this would happen in a forest or other natural plant community, since in the lab, the fungus was totally dependent on the two trees for survival and there were no other participants in the network. So basically, it's kinda like those behavior studies on captive wolves?
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
Consider. A human wakes up in a strange medical bay, with an alien doctor standing over them. Turns out their shuttle crashed, and the alien ship only just managed to teleport the, on board in time.
By some miracle, the doctor explains, they escaped with only minor injuries. Some burns, a few scratches and “several small wounds. We’re not sure what caused them.”
“Wounds?”
“Small holes in your ear lobes. Possibly they were old wounds and unrelated to the accident, but either way, our doctors were able to heal them for you. There’s not even any scarring.”
The human pauses. Thinks for a minute. “Wait… you unpierced my ears?!”
“I… Suppose we did? Is that a problem?”
“Er, not exactly. It can be redone. though it’s not gonna be fun. But my people do that to ourselves on purpose. It’s self-ornamental… I don’t know the word. We decorate ourselves with small stones and bits of shaped metal or plastic.”
“Oh!! I’m sorry, that’s a fairly rare behavior among sapients. Why, if I may ask?”
“uh. It… Looks cool? I guess?”
“…My experience with humans is limited, but I gather that’s the reason for many of your behaviors.”
*from the next bay over comes the anguished scream of your co-pilot*
“WHERE THE FUCKING FUCK ARE MY TATTOOS?!”
Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Me logging onto tumblr dot com to check my trash little blog and post my trash little posts about my trash little interests
obsessed with this actually
RIDE 'EM CRAWBOY
Doing the thing is often less painful than thinking about doing the thing.
There are all sorts of angels. Which one are you? Details of painted wings. (The first one is digital art.)
1. The Fall of Icarus by René Milot (2014)
2. Allegory of Vanity by Antonio de Perada (1632-1636)
3. The Lament for Icarus by Herbert James Draper (1898)
4. Elijah in Wilderness by Frederic Leighton (1877-1878)
5. The Abduction of Ganymede by Peter Paul Rubens (1611-1612)
6. Cupid and Pschye by François-Édouard Picot (1817)
7. Cupid Carving His Bow by Parmigianino (1533-1535)
8. Father Time by Pieter Christoffel Wonder (1810)
I so needed this today. ∞
Use yr words.
A note on the topic of trauma that I personally found helpful in accepting the idea that I am a trauma victim is that one of the most widely accepted facts in the field of trauma research is that abuse is often not the common factor in whether somebody will develop ptsd.
Many people can go through awful things without developing trauma based disorders as long as they receive compassion and support in processing those events as they happen. The most common factor in developing something like ptsd is emotional neglect. And emotional neglect on it’s own can be enough.
Whatever you went through was enough I promise, you’re not overreacting. Abuse and neglect are traumatic at any level, you don’t need to have gone through the worst possible experience you can think of to develop ptsd. If it hurt you then it hurt you.
…..oh.
And to support that, the number one determining factor on how badly something affects a person is how they’re treated afterward, not how objectively bad the event was. They’re called resiliency factors.
It looks like this:
Horrible brutal traumatic event + Family and community support + legal amelioration + closure and therapy and help
ONE MILLION TIMES MORE LIKELY TO RECOVER THAN
Event that the sufferer may think “seems minor” compared to what others have been through + Family neglect and abuse (you deserved it, name calling, support the abuser) + no legal means + denial and stifling and no therapeutic support
I have been raped, I have been abused by someone who was supposed to be family to me, and I have recovered and gotten my life back together. I have psychiatrists, psychologists, best friends, lovers, and family who support me. I did not get legal justice, but I got the person(s) out of my life.
My friend was repeatedly verbally abused by his step-parent, and when he was abused and hurt by others he was blamed for it by that parent. He had no support and no one to talk to about it for over 10 years.
He still feels guilty for even being affected by it and I’ve had long talks with him about how it isn’t “nothing compared to” what I went through.
You are not wrong to be upset. You are not wrong to feel the effects of trauma. Your hurt cannot be measured against anyone else’s. Your resiliency is your own and your situation is valid to you. Perception is everything. The worst thing that ever happened to you might ostensibly be less bad than the worst thing that ever happened to me - but it still is what happened to YOU.
Trauma is so predictable that we can make tidy little equations out of it. The ones above are good, but the ones I’ve seen are a little simpler. Something like:
Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD
Whoa. I am going to have to think about this for a bit–it would explain the HUGE difference in two post-trauma experiences I’ve had (one without support and one with.) Wow.
that tidy equation is exactly why so many ‘symptoms’ of autism are just ongoing traumatic stress disorders. it goes like this:
-grow up constantly overwhelmed by ‘normal’ situations
-be constantly told there’s no ‘real’ reason for your pain, fear, and stress
-be given no support or sympathy or tools or training to deal with the pain, be given very few options to avoid the pain, be given no acknowledgement that you’re trying to recover from the pain
-get regularly shamed and punished for the stress behaviors you involuntarily display by your caretakers, teachers, and peers, especially if you become hostile
-withdrawing from people and society is basically the only semi-acceptable way to cope with chronic overload and avoid punishment
-self-isolation comes as a profound relief
-but then you’re alone with your damage
-CPTSD
All you fuckers are like “pop tarts are ravioli!” “Uncrustables are ravioli!”
I will hit you in the face with the concepts of convergent evolution and analogous structures
I politely request that you do this.
You asked for it. This will get long and I’ve honestly put too much work into this but here goes.
So first thing first, to understand this concept you need to know how a phylogenetic tree works. A phylogenetic tree is a diagram of what species are related to what, and uses branches and nodes to show this. Real trees can get very large and complex, but let’s start with this example with 4 species.
Is species B more closely related to species A or to species D? Looking at the edge you’d assume A, because it’s closer. But in reality A and B are the least related of the group- they have the farthest common ancestor. The common ancestor is the node at which the branches split. Trace backwards to the split that contains A and B and you’ll find it’s all the way back at node 1, while the split that contains B and D is the closer node 2. The closer the common ancestor, the more you’re related. B and C are the most closely related of the group, because they share a very recent common ancestor. A, being the furthest related from B/C/D, is the outgroup.
Another concept that people find hard to grasp is that just because two animals look similar, that does not mean they are related. Relatedness is determined by evolutionary history, shown by shared structures. Shared structures that are also seen in the most recent common ancestor are called homologous, and they can show an evolutionary relationship. An example could be the tooth structure of a lion and a cat. However, sometimes two unrelated animals come up with the same idea on their own. Birds, bats, and butterflies all have wings, but they all arose independently- the most recent common ancestor of all those was VERY far back and definitely did not have wings. Those non-related but similar structures are called analogous. You cannot compare them as if they are proof of being related.
Mammal natural history is especially tricky with this. These two tiny mousy things: (A vole and a shrew)
Are MUCH more distantly related than these two: (A deer and a dolphin), who some argue are even in the same order.
(Images from Wikipedia commons)
Okay, so that’s the science lesson for the day. But what does this have to do with ravioli? Well, you can track the history of food somewhat similarly to the evolutionary history of animals. It’s a little less exact due to the changeable nature of making food, but history and relationships can be seen. I claim that the filled shape with sealed edges that is shared by ravioli, pop tarts, and Uncrustables sandwiches is an analogous structure, and grouping all three into one genus is not supported by their evolutionary history. (How is this a stronger thesis than most of what I wrote in college?)
Before we get bogged down in the details, let’s start with an overview of the big picture. Do we organize food by the culture that created it, or by its components, or by its style? If we were comparing something like sushi to something like ceviche, cultural differences would definitely come into play. However all three of the food families in question (pocket pies, sandwiches, and Italian pasta) are Western European or American in origin with heavy naturalization in white American culinary culture. Thus, we can mostly ignore cultural differences and focus on the structure.
There’s not a single common ancestor to ALL food like there is in animals, but with some grouping we can get to plant-based at the kingdom level, grain-based at the phylum level, flour-based at the class level, and divide that into the subclasses of Savory and Sweet.
Each of these two subclasses branches off into many, many infraclasses and orders. The three we are most interested in I postulate are as follows:
Putting the pie in an entirely sweet subclass, I realize, is not entirely in keeping with history as meat pies were and are rather common. If I cared enough to edit all of my diagrams at this point I would go back and do so, but this is a Tumblr essay that will maybe be fully read by a dozen people so I will call it fine. Either way, pie is the common ancestor to which we trace the pop-tart.
As you can see, each of the parties in question (Pop-tarts, ravioli, and Uncrustables) have an easily tracked evolutionary line and their filled wheat-flour-based shapes are analogous structures, not shared by a common ancestor.
Finally, to conclude my point, close relatives of the species in question can also help determine if they are related. If the close relatives of both species share the same traits, then they can be more seriously studied for relatedness. Let’s look at the closest relatives of ravioli (other members of the fresh pasta family), uncrustables (other members of the Sandwich family), and pop tarts (other members of the Pie family).
Even the closest relatives often do not share the filled form, so saying that poptarts and uncrustables ARE ravioli ignores culinary history as well as common sense.
I love this so much thank you for your service
my blog is, and always will be, a safe place for people who are not confident in their english speaking abilities. you will never be judged or mocked here.
1) Your English is probably better than you think it is. I’ve read many posts that ended with something along the lines of “sorry for my bad English” and was surprised because it was worded exactly the way a native English speaker would word it.
2) The main purpose of language is to communicate. Even if communication is a little awkward, as long as we can understand what the other person is trying to say, there’s no need for it to be perfect.
3) You speak English better than I can speak your language.
4) You speak English better than I can speak English .
5) Being able to speak a second language at all is a huge achievement and something most of the people ragging on “bad English” are incapable of themselves. You’re doing great.
6) “bad English” suggests there’s such a thing as “good English”….and have you SEEN this language? We just live like this.
